Long way from UO

I think that mining makes less sense if you can do it from any old square. I don't know the details of how UO did it, but I at least hope that different areas would give different results.

The problem with buildings and towns is complicated, but it all goes to the overworld system. It was partly due to limitations in Unity, but also recognizing that to support a large population, you needed to break things up. Other games throw housing into special instances, such as "go in this door and you're in a room that is your house" (FFXI), or "pick a pre-fab house in a 100-layer stack of pre-fab instances" (LOTRO).

One result of not having a finely-detailed enormous map is that you can drop scenes in anywhere. If everything was a LOTRO-style ginormous zone, where would you put POTs? And how would you expand them? Keep in mind that one of the actual design goals of SotA was "no shards", so whatever they did would have to scale.

And even since release, the idea of player housing in quest towns (much less on an open overworld) has been deprecated because they make quest towns harder to design. It's cool to drop a house almost anywhere, but it's both technically and narratively expensive.

As already mentioned, the backpack interface wasn't being used much, and was impeding new content.

I see combat decks as quite literally the equivalent of a class in "average" RPG systems, except that you choose the skills to make your own custom class. It limits the things you can do to ten, plus another ten that you can quickly switch to. Sure you can have the bestest offensive skill and the bestest healing skill together, but now you only have eight more left.

And then there's the deck system, which took me a while to get used to because I pre-dated deck-building games. But I comprehended the math and got used to it in a few months.

The first part is absolutely correct. The second part is because it didn't even have a proper unified quest system at all; quests were buggy and could easily get broken by doing things in the wrong order. The fact that nobody saw a need for a common quest system shows how little focus there was on a coherent story.

SotA is a great sandbox game that looks to the uninformed like a typical theme-park game, and that can really confuse new players who aren't used to sandbox games.

 

Agreed!